06 July 2022, 0:47

Dear Kristina, dear developers,

through intensive testing, my colleagues and I encountered the following problem that can occur when upgrading from 21.04 to 22.04:

A width can no longer be defined for the content type "Image gallery". Instead, the (source) image that is enlarged automatically, is inserted as a thumbnail. There is no longer an option to change the size (the manual entry for 22.04 shows an older version:  https://manual.mahara.org/en/22.04/blocks/files.html#image-gallery ). Upgrading to 22.04 existing "Image gallery" elements are all "shrunk", which has drastic consequences for the appearance of existing (group) start pages. 

However, I´d like to mention that decisions like this contradicts the compatibility of older and newer versions of Mahara. An upgrade becomes very difficult if design elements that also have a didactic function (e.g. show an infographic for the group so that they can orientate themselves) are simply changed. 

There is a specific reason why and how the users style a page with certain block elements. And if a function is offered, then of course they use it and see what they can do with it for designing a teaching-learning setting optimatically. If the site is - after an Upgrade - completely changed (and for my part I think it's destroyed because you have to rebuild it and conceptualize it didactically new), that's a big problem. While it may seem unimportant in detail, with many sites in a large institution, such a detail scales into a big problem. I have the impression that these considerations are not or not sufficiently included in such decisions. Otherwise, our users are so turned off that they no longer want to use mahara because it is one difficulty too many that they are confronted with - in addition to the others.

Please don't misunderstand me: I defend mahara as great software for e-portfolio work. I would like to thank all the developers who make this gift available to us. My request would be: at least a hint if such details change, and a solution for a smooth transfer to the new version. That would help very much to keep standing up for Mahara, still defending it against the critics and doing some decent support work!

Thank you for your open ear in this matter!

Cheers
Elisabeth

07 July 2022, 14:03

Hi Elisabeth,

Thank you for pointing out that the Mahara 22.04 manual is not quite up to date yet for all screenshots and functionalities. I do miss some of the changes that are not introduced via new features or bigger changes.

We did indeed remove the width requirement in the image gallery as a thumbnail should just be that: a small representation of the actual image to then be clicked for a larger version. Removing the width element was for better usability so as not to overburden people with an extra setting that wouldn't be changed in most cases, yours being the exception to that rule. Designing something for particular dimensions is pretty difficult these days with pages that do need to work on lots of different devices.

It is still possible to achieve a big image using the image gallery by selecting 'Slideshow' as that fills the entirety of the block. If only a single image is displayed, the 'Image' block may be a better choice. It would be great to know why the student selected the 'Image gallery' block when only one image is added.

When re-designing functionality, we go by what we have seen from people using features in Mahara on multiple occasions, improvement suggestions from a usability and accessibility perspective, and our own experience using the functionalities. Inadvertently, that might mean that we change functionality that some people have relied on existing in a particular way. We can always discuss those changes to see whether we should revert to the older version or whether additional changes are needed. Alternatively, Mahara can always be customised to retain certain functionalities or to extend it by things that are not (yet) in Mahara core. In your case, one possibility could be to run a database query and change all 'thumbnails' to 'Slideshow' for image gallery instances where only one image is used in the block so as not to ask every student who has used the block that way to make that change.

We invite feedback on changes and also already on proposed changes either on the bug / feature reports or when functionality is in peer review before they make it into Mahara to discuss the best way forward as we don't know of all the different ways that all features are used - either as they were intended or as workarounds. I do understand that not everybody is in a privileged position as our team at Catalyst to have easy access to a developer environment and put a patch on it to test it out or has the time to check our public developer instance for any recent changes. That should not hold you back from reporting things like that when you come across them because if we decide that we should bring back a particular feature, then we can do so for affected supported versions of Mahara, and we've done that in the past, when something was removed by accident that our testing hasn't caught.

In this case, I would not bring back the functionality to set a particular dimension because the 'Slideshow' option seems a valid alternative or the use of the 'Image' block, and changing the block instances via the database to change from 'Thumbnail' to 'Slideshow' would also be possible. Delineating between thumbnail and slideshow removed some of the guesswork of what options to choose. That's why we had also removed the second thumbnail option.

Thank you

Kristina